Consider a humble box of breakfast cereal. On its side you will find
a list of minerals. Minerals which are so essential
for our metabolism that we are willing to make exceptions,
even in times of war, for trade in grains. This has happened indeed in the current conflict
between Russia and Ukraine. Now minerals are also essential
for humanity in another pivotal way. They help us build the infrastructure
to deliver on clean, reliable energy. Energy, of course, drives life
in all its various forms, and mineral raw materials are the means
by which we harness that energy. Now the interesting thing is
that the more sustainable forms of energy are the ones that require more materials. Have a look at this research we did. For the same amount of energy generation, take a look at how much more material
you need for solar, wind, hydropower and geothermal. For solar in particular, the blue bar represents critical minerals which are required for us to squeeze
that sunshine juice that we so crave. Now I've spent most of my career
studying environmental and social conflicts and finding ways of resolving them. And what I've discovered is that those conflicts
that involve minerals and energy are the most intractable. Why is that the case? Well, it's because minerals and energy
infrastructure are confined by geography. You can only mine
where there are minerals. You can only have wind power
where you've got wind, and so on. So you are in this situation where you're only going to be able to harness these resources
in particular areas. So if you look here,
South Africa for example, has massive reserves of platinum. That's an accident of geology. But that makes South Africa a pivotal
player in the hydrogen economy. Why, you would wonder? Hydrogen? Platinum? Well, you need platinum
for hydrogen fuel cells. Also have a look
at China's dominance there. China has invested tremendously
in downprocessing their technologies around especially refining minerals. And so downstream refining
is also going to be pivotal in delivering those minerals. Now diversification
is something we are seeking, and one of the ways in which
we're trying to do that is to invest all over the world
in other places where we can mine and refine. But keep in mind
that if you're going to do that, you will probably end up
developing new sites, and that may not necessarily
be more efficient economically or cleaner even. So, while diversification
builds resilience, it is likely to lead to greenfield
development, new sites, right, as opposed to brownfield development. Now with greenfield development,
we have a challenge because communities often don't want
these sites in their backyard. We've just seen
in the last year in Minnesota, there was a very lucrative
green-transition minerals project, which was denied a permit
by the US Department of Interior because of concerns on social
and environmental risks raised by Indigenous communities. And indeed, we need
to respect those concerns. So you have this strange situation
where you have geopolitical tensions between countries where there is
immense supply of resources and those where there is demand, such as between China
and the United States currently. And then you have domestic conflicts
over social and environmental risk. So this is the perfect storm, right? How do we get out of it? Well my big bet is
that we can get out of it if we reconfigure the conversation
around a planetary mechanism or what I'm calling a "mineral trust"
for the green transition. Now how would this mineral trust work? Well, it would be similar
to an asset protection trust, where you've got a beneficiary
that assigns a third party with control, which is a trustee, on how to manage
those resources most effectively. So in this case, in the mineral trust, the beneficiaries would be
the mineral producing countries. You would also have
the technology-producing countries who are demanding the minerals part of the trustee relationship. So the trustees would be both. And so the minerals would go
into the mineral trust. You would have a market price
that would be paid by those countries that are demanding the minerals. Profits would still accrue
in the same way. And you would have key decision points
managed by technical, not political arms of the United Nations. And this would in this case be the International Renewable Energy Agency and the Climate Technology
Centre and Network. And so what you would have then
is this mechanism that is much more technocratic and also much more efficient. You would also pivotally have
a green stockpile where, under situations
of commodity price changes, you would be buffered from those problems
for mineral-producing countries. And it would also be
like a rainy day fund. Now in terms of the larger
scheme of things, this is going to potentially
play out pretty well. But you would wonder
why would this be operationalized? And so a country
like Indonesia, let's say, it's the world's largest
nickel producer, right? It would still have the full
control over producing nickel and also being able to sell
the nickel for profit. The only difference is
it couldn't weaponize the control of its resource. And that would make this
a much more efficient system for the global economy as well. Now I can understand some of you
may be still very concerned that this kind of a mechanism
is unnecessary. Friends in the environmentalist
community would say: "We should just be consuming less,
we shouldn't be mining," right? And I totally agree with you, but that's for high-income countries. Keep in mind there are
760 million people, at least, who do not have access
to even electricity. You can't ask them
to consume less, right? So you've got that dynamic at play. Now the second question, which our friends
would often raise, again, within the environmentalist
community is: "Why don't we recycle?" Right? And that's a very cogent question, but you need to have stock
of material to recycle, folks. If you don't have the stock,
you can't recycle. And the other challenge with recycling
is that it puts you in this trade off between durability of a product -- so you want your product to last long because that's an important
sustainability criterion, but if it lasts long,
you can't recycle it, right? So you have to find that sweet spot of how long you want
to have that product in use. And we did this analysis
just for electric car batteries. And in here you can see
in the red bars basically that is the amount of mineral
stock in 2015 to 2016 that was available
out of recycled material to contribute towards
manufacturing these batteries. And look at the blue bars,
how the demand is likely to grow. And that's in-use material. So the average sweet spot is 14 years
for an electric car battery. So you want it to last 14 years. And you cannot have that material
available for recycling, OK? But the good news with our mineral trust is that it can still be used
as a mechanism actually to have recycling put through. Where would it go? You could put it in the stockpile. So once you have the stocks,
you want a circular economy, you put it in the stockpile,
and you could even lease metal, which is really cool, right? Like you lease your cars,
you could lease your metal. And you know, that way
batteries could be leased and so on. And that creates incentives as well. But the trust can be used for that too. Now I know there are still
friends who will be skeptics, especially in the defense establishment. And they'll say, like, this guy coming
from academia, rolling their eyes, basically saying, you know, this fellow is just singing some
mineral kumbaya in la la land. He has no idea about realpolitik and, you know, the high politics
of war and peace. Well I would respectfully submit to them that I have actually looked
at war and peace issues. I come originally from Pakistan, which is a country that has
endured much conflict. So I am sensitive to those issues. And you'd be surprised, actually, to find that it is precisely
over planetary issues where humanity has cooperated
in unlikely ways. The only treaty in the United Nations
system where we have ratification from all UN member states
is a treaty on environmental protection. It's the treaty to protect
the ozone layer, alright? Now you'd say that was in 1987, it was a time of relative peace. Well go back to the 1950s. We have the Antarctic Treaty, where you had multiple claimants
on this massive continent. And those claimants,
for the greater good of science, set aside their claims, and they signed the Antarctic Treaty, including the former Soviet Union. Have a look at this photograph as well. It shows scientists
from the former Soviet Union and the United States of America chatting quite amiably at the International Institute
for Applied Systems Analysis, IIASA. That's a mouthful, just remember IIASA. IIASA was established
at the height of the Cold War, in the year I was born, incidentally. But that organization
is still around today. Why was it established even then? Because during the Cold War, too, the former Soviet Union, the United States
and many other countries realized that global environmental
data has to be shared. And it is this institution which develops many of the social protection models
around climate change as well, in terms of doing scenario analysis. And so IIASA shows us that we can cooperate
over these kinds of issues as well. Now even in terms of metals, we have had one experiment
of trying to cooperate. The United Nations Conference
on Trade and Development in the 1970s tried to set up a trading
platform for the metal tin. But it didn't work because it was never framed
around planetary sustainability issues. So I've tried to, in this idea
for a mineral trust, learn from these lessons and mistakes
so that it is a very pragmatic idea. It's not pie in the sky,
it's something we can do. The good news is we do have
now a new panel that has been established by
the United Nations secretary general that is focused on energy
transition minerals. So we hope that this idea can hopefully
be taken up in a very timely way, because time is running out. Scientists have consensus that we have basically come to the point of crossing five key
tipping points on climate change within the next few decades. And without minerals, folks, we cannot mitigate emissions,
as I have shown. But we cannot even adapt. Because even for infrastructure, for adaptation,
you need minerals, right? So minerals are a civilizational asset. We don't need to fight over them. We have the history and precedent to show
that we can cooperate over them, just as we have cooperated over grains, which have minerals, in times of war, we can surely cooperate over minerals
that energize our lives. Our future depends on it. Thank you. (Applause)